News

It is turning into a widespread problem that malicious apps, designed for mobile phones with an Android operating system, compromise user data. In order to protect yourself, you need to be very familiar with your device, something that is often daunting for consumers. Computer scientists from the Saarland University have developed a new kind of application that enables even inexperienced users to protect their smartphone with minimal effort. Additionally, the software lets business users install professional profiles on employees’ private mobile devices, and facilitates the management of these employee profiles.

When performing an online search for sensitive topics, one may wish to remain unobserved. Millions of people use the Tor network for that purpose, even though it does not provide perfect anonymity. Computer scientists from the Saarland University have now developed a program that can measure the anonymity of a user's connection within the Tor network. The scientists used real-time data from the Tor network, and examined a wide range of possible attackers (Hall 9, Booth E13).

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About the Cluster of Excellence
on "Multimodal Computing and Interaction"

Mission

The past three decades have brought dramatic changes in the way we live and work. This phenomenon is widely characterized as the advent of the Information Society. It is fueled by the power of information technology to acquire, store, process and transmit data compactly, inexpensively and at greater speeds than ever before. Ten years ago, most digital content was textual. Today, graphical and audiovisual I/O devices are in widespread use, and modern personal computers and interaction devices have multimedia capabilities. As a result, current digital content additionally comprises speech, audio, video and graphics. Ubiquitous sensing devices further increase the global volume of digital data. The availability of digital content in different modalities and increasingly pervasive access to the Internet combine to make a host of information available to anyone, at any time.

Given these trends, the challenge now is to organize, understand, search and interface this multimodal information in a robust, efficient and intelligent way, and to create dependable systems that support natural and intuitive multimodal interaction. The Cluster of Excellence on Multimodal Computing and Interaction was established by the German Research Foundation (DFG) within the framework of the German Excellence Initiative in November 2007. After five years of sucessfull research, the cluster is now going into its second phase, starting in November 2012.